Saturday, March 19, 2005

At least, we're okay bullying them around and calling them names. I can
only imagine Gates sneaking behind an Office customer to get down on all
four so that Ballmer can push them backwards and flip them over, bellowing,
"Dinosaur! Unevolved corporate
dinosaur!"

Or maybe we're just being passive-aggressive, and name-calling them for
their love and satisfaction with Office 97. They can't see any reason to
upgrade to Office 2003. So we unleash our marketing campaigns to allow them
to be enlightened to all the great reasons to upgrade to the latest
version.

Isn't it a very big, loud "thunk!" of a product feature
canary dropping dead when the features you ship are so intangible and
unexplainable that marketing can't even market them? Instead, they have to
show people creating dogpiles of ecstasy thanks to Great
Moments at Work? Or, they have to resort to the emotions of fear and
inadequacy by showing your old software represents reptilian-brain slowness on your part?

How about telling me directly why Word is so
much better than in Office 97? Or Excel? Or - ooo! - okay, Outlook is indeed
pretty. That makes me feel good... where's my wallet? PowerPoint, anything
new there? As for the rest of the programs... well, I just get p.o.'d if I
ever am forced into using them.

Find referenceable users and
empower them to blog on your site - Use PubSub, Feedster, MSN
Search and customer data, etc. and find the most vocal Office 2003
enthusiasts in the blogosphere. Initiate a dialogue with them and, if
they're interested, give them blogs where they can regularly chronicle how
they use Office 2003 to improve their daily productivity. Let the customers
tell your story.

Have loyal Office 2000 and 2003
users debate each other head-to-head - Find two users of the Office
suite - one a loyal 2000 user, another a 2003 fan - and let them them debate
each other on the merits of their choice of suite via a shared blog.

It would be
interesting to see more Microsoft individual contributors actually actively
advocating and using our products in a visible and shared fashion. But that
would require giving them time to do this. I'm pretty passionate about what
I develop and I do my best to advocate for it internally, but I can only
dream about having time to build that to the next level of creating quality
components I'd like to share outside of the intranet. I'm sure there are a
lot of folks in Office that are the same way and can create tools and
examples that make the latest bits shine, shimmer, and sing. But they are
not afforded the time and luxury for this.

Is a Google-esque 20% affordance the answer? I don't think so (mostly
because all the lazy dot-com dead-woods in my building would be the first
lining up for that playtime). Maybe after we've had some good layoffs.
But for now, if leadership was to get behind people providing compelling
reasons for customers to use the latest technology, they can then ensure
that folks producing quality results had the time to do so and that they
were rewarded. If we can't demonstrate the coolness and greatness of our own
products, who can?

Update: fixed bad anchor close tag. Clarification: what I'm looking for in the above two paragraphs isn't more blogging but rather a lightweight process where Microsofties can release great software - add-ons, power-toys, whatever - when our new software comes out that can build buzz and love for the new software rather than throwing it against the wall and seeing what sticks.

19 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Wow,

The Office guys actually come up with an innovative campaign that actually talks about the new features of Office instead of feel good platitudes and you reject it only to suggest "blogging is the answer". When did Scoble take over writing this blog?

No, I don't think the last point is that blogging is the answer. I think it is releasing power-tools and examples that leverage the latest software - like a labs.office.microsoft.com. Something like that might get customers excited about the latest software, but I seriously doubt Microsoft would ever get a light-weight process approved to release such tools and examples.

But blogging is too disparate to really get customers excited about Office. Maybe analysts. It's more like pissing in the wind, though. You need a central place to go to.

Is may be a problem for Microsoft if customers don't need more features, but it's not a problem for customers. If that's the tough reality Microsoft faces, maybe it's time to steer the Titanic off the course of the Features Iceberg, and instead strip out the crap nobody wants or uses.

What if Outlook was stripped down to only the features David Allen recommends? What if PowerPoint was stripped down to only the features Cliff Atkinson recommends? You'd have a passionate base of customers buying those leaner and meaner products, that help them apply a useful methodology rather than Microsoft's feature-obsession.

I would be first in line to buy it, and I'm sure a few million more customers would too.

Whew, okay, removed the duplicate postings that appeared over and over. Yes, I think the Blogger commenting system (recently revised) has some usability problems that case multiple postings by accident.

Office is definitely a victin of its own success... I think we should definitely go for the leaner ad meaner package, cheaper too, to flood the market with good feature set (perhaps a feature subset of what we have now - but not like the "Starter Edition XP" joke - who EVER thought about THAT idea???).

If we got something cheaper out there that people can afford, perhaps make it for end users only - we'd raise a lot of hell with "Open" alternatives. And I don't mean Works either. Package Outlook, Word and Excel, trim it down of fat, ship it. Recycle electrons!

Its funny - NONE of my neighbors run Office or even Outlook. Nobody. Its just too expensive for mere mortals. Heck I would not run it if I did not have a employee discount! Outlook 2003 is nice but not THAT nice.

No. Like most people I have a Home Office where I write documents (letters and documents for my after-work activities) and create spreadsheets (typically to analyze/manage some part of my personal finances). I sometimes work on these files at work as well as home. I also want to edit my documents & spreadsheets using the same UI at work and home. Does any of this sound unreasonable or esoteric?

I don't qualify for the student version of Office and I'm not forking out serious cash for a full version of the latest Office. MS Works comes oh so close with its full version of Word but it has a lame spreadsheet application.

Office 97 fits the bill perfectly. It does everything I've ever needed at home, it interoperates with the fancy schmancy Office at work and has a similar UI, but best of all the standard edition is dirt cheap on eBay.

Quote:Do us a favor - don't join the Office team or anything else to do with product stategy or marketing. Hint: Office -> Home. Home Response:People do work-related things at home, and they do home-related things at work. They need to be able to share their documents and data between multiple PCs in multiple locations for ONE LOW PRICE. They need to be able to share data and documents with friends and family members who may or may not have the same software products or versions.

Most of the "extra" features are useless annoyances, on the same level as Clippy. Tell the marketing guys to come out with a slimmed-down and simple-to-use version of Office that SMB and corporate buyers can buy AND legally give a (single) copy to employees to use at home. Make it able to seamlessly read and write OOo, ODF, WP, and Works file formats without any extra configuration. If they do that, MS won't ever have to worry about competitors products.

Disclaimer

These are sole individual personal points-of-view and the posts and comments by the participants in no way represent the official point-of-view of Microsoft or any other organization. This is a discussion to foster debate and by no means an enactment of policy-violation. These posts are provided "as-is" with no warranties and confer no rights. So chill. And think.